[Zope-Annce] [Ann] epoz 1.0 beta1 released
Philipp von Weitershausen
philipp at weitershausen.de
Fri Nov 14 10:27:15 EST 2003
The epoz project is pleased to announce the first beta version of its
cross-browser visual HTML editor!
Originally written by Maik Jablonski, the editor famous in the world of
Zope and Plone was completely redesigned by Paul Everitt (Zope Europe
Association) and Guido Wesdorp (Infrae) and Philipp von Weitershausen
(philiKON Valley). The result is a very flexible editing machine based
on the following concepts:
- Integration
epoz was designed to be highly integrable into target products. It
uses Zope Page Templates (ZPT) for the XHTML templating. ZPTs hide
templating instructions in XML namespaces. That way, all XHTML
templates in epoz remain valid XHTML documents and should be able
to be used in similar templating systems without modification.
That also means, epoz can directly be used off of the filesystem
or served by Apache, without any templating engine.
- Document-centric and asynchronous editing
Other in-browser editors simply provide a replacement for the
textarea element in XHTML forms. epoz instead focuses on
document-centric editing. It lets you edit the contents of an
XHTML document and dublin core metadata (Title, Creator etc.) in a
compact and standard-conformant way. Upon save, epoz constructs a
full-fledged XHTML document again and invokes a PUT request to the
server. Being a standard HTTP command, PUT requests can be served
by nearly any webserver, even Apache (with mod_dav)!
- Customization and extensibility
The looks of epoz can be modified without having to modify the
XHTML templates by simply customizing the Cascading Style
Sheets. Its JavaScript architecture has been modelled after the
MVC concept. That means you may customize large or small parts of
the editor without having to reimplement or subclass anything, but
it also means extending epoz's functionality is just as easy.
Where can I get it?
You may download a tarball at the the epoz project homepage at
Sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=84377
How can I use it?
epoz comes with a great deal of documentation already. The
INSTALL.txt file in the 'doc' directory should provide a small set
of introductions for Zope users.
If you would like to see epoz in action without having to install it
in Zope, you may either download the tarball and open
'common/epozmacros.html' in your browser or visit the following URL
(served by Apache, btw):
http://www.philikon.de/files/epoz/common/epozmacros.html
If you happen to succeed at integrating epoz into your favourite web
application server, feel free to contact us if you would like to
contribute your code to the project. Equally, any documentation
about how to integrate, customize or extend are very welcome.
What to expect for future releases
- Link and image toolbox:
The original Epoz editor provided a toolbox for Plone users that
was loaded in a browser pop-up window. Since epoz 1.0 puts a lot
of focus on document-centric editing, it places toolbox elements
such as a link or image browser and table creator right on the
edit page. Results for link and image searching will be loaded
asynchronously in a yet-to-defined XML format.
In upcoming releases, we will provide asynronous server-side
methods for link and image searching in Zope2, CMF, Plone and
Zope3.
- Plone integration:
Although we have made an effort to integrate it with Plone
1.0/2.0, we have seen that current versions of Plone does not
allow an editor to take over for document-centric editing. Philipp
has made a Plone Improvement Proposal (PLIP) to provide a visual
editing architecture in Plone
(http://plone.org/development/current/projects/PLIP5). The
proposal has been accepted by the community and Philipp is
currently implementing. It is expected that Plone 2.1 will be
ready to be plugged together with upcoming versions of epoz.
How to report bugs?
Please help us make epoz 1.0 bugfree and report bugs you encounter
at:
http://codespeak.net/issues/epoz/ (mind the trailing slash)
Further questions? Write us to:
epoz-development at lists.sourceforge.net
We are looking forward to your comments.
On behalf of the epoz project,
Philipp von Weitershausen
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